Tennesseee Taoist Peter Ragnar (interview)

Note – this guy sounds pretty fun, I may look him up next time I pass thru TN. Good stories about his relationships with wild animals. And, of course, I happen to agree with his comments on Ramana Maharshi and G. Buddha’s premature deaths due to illness. – Michael

IF YOU’RE CONSCIOUS, HOW CAN YOU DIE?
AN INTERVIEW WITH A MODERN-DAY TAOIST WIZARD PETER RAGNAR
By Andrew Cohen
What Is Enlightenment?
SeptemberNovember 2005

http://www.wie.org/j30/ragnar.asp

I’ve often wondered how it would look if someone like Jack LaLanne or
Anthony Robbins — whom I’ve always admired for their indomitable spirit,
incredible self-discipline, and joie de vivre — became enlightened. When I
discovered Peter Ragnar, I think I found out.

The amazing Peter Ragnar is a modern-day shaman, Taoist wizard, natural life
scientist, and self-master par excellence. He lives in the Tennessee
mountains with his wife, and he claims to be a ³senior citizen² but refuses
to give away his age because he ³doesn’t believe in it.² He does strenuous
two-hour strength-training workouts seven days a week and performs
record-breaking feats. He’s been a martial arts practitioner for over fifty
years, and he has developed his own version of Taoist energy practice called
³Magnetic Qi Gong,² which he claims is the key to immortality. He has
healing powers and is renowned for his clairvoyant and telepathic abilities.
He lives on a strict diet of raw foods and juices and has spent a lifetime
studying the relationship between the body and the mind at all levels. And
his most remarkable attainment is his profound awakening to the energetic
dimension, or ³bio-electric-magnetic² field, of life. While this dimension
of reality and experience is one that many have heard of, it’s a world that
Peter actually lives in.

All this being said, Peter’s most compelling and inspiring message is his
steadfast and passionate call to self-mastery based upon the relentless
cultivation of intention. This foundational element of his teaching is
clearly a contemporary expression of the great American New Thought
tradition, championed in the early twentieth century by Napoleon Hill,
author of the all-time bestseller Think and Grow Rich,and later by Norman
Vincent Peale, known for his widely acclaimed, inspirational classic The
Power of Positive Thinking. Hill wrote in 1937, ³Whatever the mind of man
can conceive and believe it can achieve.² At the beginning of the new
millennium, Peter Ragnar is proving that it’s still true!

…………….

ANDREW COHEN: Peter, why is it that you declare that there is no explainable
reason why a person should die, other than his or her belief in death?

PETER RAGNAR: Because I feel that we have ultimate control to the degree
that we’re conscious. If we are conscious enough, we can make anything
happen in our body. We can preserve this body or we can kill this body.

It’s very simple to see how people kill their bodies with their thoughts —
it’s a product of their unconsciousness of causes and effects. If we’re
conscious of our thoughts — I mean luminously conscious of our thoughts —
those thoughts then impregnate the cellular structure of our body in a way
that is very, very difficult to explain. When you have an abundance of life
force inside you, it pours out of your eyes. It comes out of the palms of
your hands as heat, as healing heat. It radiates as if you swallowed the
sun, and you are different. Now, with that type of dynamic and powerful
energy inside of you, how can you die?

COHEN: Interesting question!

RAGNAR: It’s a working hypothesis, of course. But the more life we have
running through our body’s energy system, the more alive we are. Life is not
death, life is the opposite of death. So embracing life is the situation.
How many people embrace life with every thought and every action and every
decision they make? Only a very, very rare few.

You see, we’ve been conditioned to believe in death. Right from the very
first breath we take, we feel like life is a march between the womb and the
tomb.

COHEN: (laughs) Well, it does seem that everything in the universe that is
born and takes on physical form goes through a maturation process and
ultimately degenerates and falls away.

RAGNAR: That’s true. But let’s look at it from the standpoint of a
caterpillar in the process of becoming a butterfly. Andrew, do butterflies
come out of deformed cocoons, or do they come out of cocoons that are fully
perfected?

COHEN: Cocoons that are fully perfected.

RAGNAR: Exactly. So I feel that we should endeavor with every ounce of
strength that we have to create a perfect life, to become fully perfected as
human beings, and then see if we fly. Now, we may not. I may be wrong. But
the quest is to be a perfect human.

That may sound rather egotistic. People might say, ³Oh no, just give up,
don’t do anything. You’re efforting too much.² But it’s not effort — it’s
our evolution. Our evolution is to get better and better and better at every
single thing that we do. For example, I’m well past my athletic prime,
according to the experts, and yet I keep breaking my own personal records. I
don’t believe in age; I’m ageless. But I will say that I’m a senior citizen,
a pre-baby boomer. And I continue to break records I couldn’t have done when
I was in my twenties and thirties. Why? Because I don’t believe in
limitations. And because I don’t believe in them, I’m free. I’m free to do
anything I want to do. If I want to break world records, I can break world
records, if that’s what’s important.

COHEN: What you seem to be saying is, ³Let’s make the effort to transcend
all of our self-limiting thoughts, all of our convictions of emotional,
psychological, spiritual, and physical limitation. Let’s first try to
discover, at least as far as we can humanly imagine, what a perfectly full
and absolutely positive embrace of the human experience is. And then let’s
see what the result is going to be on every level, including the physical.²
Is that what you mean?

RAGNAR: Absolutely. You put it as good as it can be put.

COHEN: So therefore, you don’t actually mean that if you strive to live a
perfect life, you will live forever. But that if you strive to live a
perfect life, you don’t exactly know how long you’re going to live, but
let’s find out. That kind of thing?

RAGNAR: Exactly, let’s find out. It’s a working hypothesis. Let’s find out
if this life is a definite one of eighty to ninety years, or seventy to
eighty years, however gerontologists might want to estimate it — or whether
it’s an indefinite life that you can go on living as long as you stay in
that space. If you can live the ³perfect life,² how long would that life
span be?

COHEN: What would it mean, then, to live a perfect life?

RAGNAR: Well, first, it would be free of all limiting beliefs, because we
are not limited creatures unless we believe we’re limited. And how do we
drop all limitations? By becoming more conscious. By adding more conscious
energy and life force to our physical organism until we literally see it
glowing; we see it glowing in the dark.

COHEN: Peter, what is the life force? Where does it come from?

RAGNAR: I wish I knew that. The Chinese Taoists call it chi, and a lot of
people refer to it. But these are just words. It’s an oscillation that is
absolutely physically measurable. To the degree that your body oscillates
with its vibration, it can be measured. But what it is . . . they’re still
arguing about what electricity is! We know how to create it, but we don’t
know what it is.

Every time you have an electrical field, you also have a magnetic field, so
you can’t really talk about electricity without bringing magnetism into it.
But what’s beyond that? They’ve discovered that maybe the smallest quantum
of energy is actually what is defined as chi. It’s an oscillation of
something that gives off a bio-electric-magnetic field. The stronger that
bio-electric-magnetic field is, the more vitality the individual has, the
more life force. And of course, you’ll see it in the electricity in the
eyes; you’ll hear it in the voice; you’ll see it in the way the body flows
without hesitation; you’ll see it in the posture. I don’t know what it is;
all I know is that I am that.

COHEN: You make a distinction, I think, between prenatal and postnatal chi.
Could you explain what the difference is?

RAGNAR: Basically, we come into this life with a battery that has a certain
amount of juice in it. I call this prenatal chi. If you don’t do a thing and
you just continue to run with your lights on and the radio blaring,
eventually the battery will wear out, depending upon how much demand you put
on it. And that’s generally seventy to eighty years. So we’ve got a battery
that is meant to last at least that long. However, if you plug the battery
in at night and you charge it, there’s no end in sight — that’s postnatal
chi. I have a concept that says: If you go to bed with more energy than you
woke up with, then all night long, you’ve got the battery charger on. And
that’s the secret to life. It’s that simple.

COHEN: How do you go to bed with more energy than you woke up with? Is it
because you’re building it during the day?

RAGNAR: Right. This is why I do what I call Magnetic Qi Gong. I’ve
discovered a way to go to bed with my body buzzing. And the buzz is
basically the battery charger. We tested this just last week with a
chiropractic acupuncture clinic. They brought their electro-meridian imaging
equipment up here, and after I did some chi gong, they tested me. The unit
can’t even measure past where the life force in my kidneys reached; they
said they’d never seen anything like that before. The Chinese say that the
life force is in the kidneys, and there are some reasons for that, but
nevertheless, they couldn’t believe the readings. The readings were off the
chart.

And it’s not just the kidneys — it’s all the organs. If you do certain
practices, you can enhance the voltage in all the organs and meridians of
the body. Basically, we’re buzzing power plants. We’re nuclear power plants.

COHEN: And you believe that human life expectancy should be between 160 and
200 years?

RAGNAR: If you look at the rate of maturation of any animal — in other
words, the ratio of the length of time it takes an animal to mature to the
length of its life span — for most animals it’s ten to twenty times. A
horse, for example, will mature in two years and live for twenty-five to
thirty years. Same thing with chimpanzees, dogs, cats — with all animals,
it’s at least ten to twenty times. The only exception to this rule is the
human species. Even if you take ten times human maturity, which is a low
figure, that gives you 180 years. If it’s twenty times, then double that.

You’ve got to get sick in order to die. Nobody dies healthy. I’ve heard
people say, ³They just died of old age.² And I say, ³No, they had so many
diseases, they didn’t know which one killed them!² To get sick, you have to
get into some type of negativity that damages one or more particular organs.

I’m probably out there by myself on this one, but I feel that we do have
ultimate control of our body, because our body is a thought. It’s filled
with frozen memories — memories that are formed by our experiences that we
have already reached conclusions about, and we’ve emotionalized those
conclusions and frozen them into our flesh. Therefore, only when we thaw it
out and release, and stop holding on for dear life, can we have dear life.

COHEN: What you’re saying is that a lot of the ideas and beliefs that we
have about who we are, about the nature of life, and about how long it’s
possible to live are subconscious and unquestioned. So in this sense, I
understand what you mean about them being frozen in our body. And unless
they are released, since we are not aware of them, they are likely to
determine our destiny.

RAGNAR: Precisely.

COHEN: Okay. That’s clear. But when you said that our body is a thought, did
you mean that literally?

RAGNAR: Yes, I meant that literally. Actually, I should have said that many,
many trillions of thoughts form our body. And it’s really the health of our
overall life view or worldview that determines our physical health.

COHEN: You seem to have awakened to a perspective where you see the
nondifference between the physical, the psychological, the emotional, the
spiritual, and the energetic — where you’re able to see all these as
literally one process. And of course, most of us are in the habit of
relating to our experience in a way that is very conceptual and completely
divorced from the integrity of the process itself. The way we see our
experience is often only a small fraction of the totality of what’s really
happening. And I suppose that unless one actually gets to the point where
one directly experiences this insight into the ultimate nondifference
between spirit and matter, there will still be some kind of fundamental
separation between what one is doing and how one is thinking about the
process, some fundamental duality in terms of oneself.

RAGNAR: You’re describing it so well, Andrew, because there is no
separation.

COHEN: Some people would say that this insight into the fact that there is a
much deeper relationship between the mind and the body than we had
previously thought is true up to a point, but that there are certain
processes that really won’t be affected by what we think, certain processes
that are, in fact, unconscious. And you’re basically defying that. You’re
saying that it’s possible to become so conscious of these physical processes
that we would be able to have absolute control over the whole system.

RAGNAR: Absolutely. There are so many people, for example, who have had
spontaneous remissions of cancer. The medical researchers scratch their
heads and say they don’t know why it goes away. But the reason it goes away
is that the intention to live is so powerful, so strong, that it overrides
any other negative programming that might be in the body.

A classic example that is cited in psychology texts is the Krebiozen story.
A cancer patient, Mr. Wright, got this worthless placebo — at least that’s
what the AMA eventually said about the drug Krebiozen. He went to a doctor
and said, ³Look, I’m dying.² He had tumors so big they had to milk them. And
the doctor said, ³What’s it going to hurt to give the guy Krebiozen? He’s
going to be dead in a weekend anyway. It’s an inoperable cancer, the worst
of the worst.² After he got the worthless drug, the journals stated, ³His
tumors melted like snowballs on a hot stove.² He totally recovered from his
cancer in ten days’ time. No one could explain it. Unfortunately, the story
has a bad ending because later, when Mr. Wright read the AMA report
revealing that Krebiozen was worthless, he said, ³Oh, it was worthless,² and
his cancer came back, and he died.

Here you have a classic example of the power of intention. His intent was to
stay alive, and when he saw that he had an opportunity, the body said, ³Yes
sir, what do you want us to do?² All the immune soldiers lined up and
saluted him and said, ³Whatever you want; you’re the commander.² And we are
the commander.

COHEN: What do you think happened to the cancer? If it went into total
remission, theoretically, it wouldn’t be there anymore, so it wouldn’t be
able to come back. Are you saying that the cancer that was originally
present was also a thought?

RAGNAR: Yes, I believe that. Look at how many people die after receiving a
diagnosis saying they’ve got six weeks to live. And sure enough, in six
weeks they’re dead. Yet what if it was a misdiagnosis, as it has been in
some cases?

COHEN: Yes. But one could live next to a chemical plant and get poisoned, or
live next to Chernobyl and get cancer from radiation, and that wouldn’t
necessarily have anything to do with any negative thinking, right?

RAGNAR: It’s a hard question to answer because people get very sensitive
when you say anything about personal responsibility. But I think that if I
had been living in the Ukraine, there would have been something inside me
that said, ³Get out of here, boy; get out of here.² You know, whenever a
severe storm comes, if you look around here, the animals are gone. They
disappear; they know. All you have to do is listen to nature, and it tells
you everything and anything you need to know about life. The animals know
without knowing all the time. Not some of the time, not part of the time,
but all of the time. And we do too.

COHEN: But there were thousands of people who would have had no warning. I
mean, that has to be part of the equation, doesn’t it?

RAGNAR: When do we have no warning? I’ve said this so many times, and I know
it bugs people. It irritates them when I say, ³Look, you never have an
accident without being warned at least three times in advance. It’s just
that you fail to hear or see or perceive the very warning that’s before
you.² Nothing happens to us without us first being told about it. It’s like
the tsunami. Where did the animals go? They already knew.

COHEN: Yes, that was amazing.

RAGNAR: Well, we have the same faculty.

COHEN: But let’s say you’re driving through a town where the water has been
completely polluted, and you don’t know it. And you happen to go to a diner
and drink a cup of tea or something, and then eventually, you get cancer as
a result.

RAGNAR: You’d know it. You’d know it ahead of time.

COHEN: But how would you know?

RAGNAR: Are you familiar with behavioral kinesiology, or muscle testing?

COHEN: Yes.

RAGNAR: Okay. How is it that certain things weaken us and certain things
strengthen us? Our body tells us. Our body sends us a signal, and that
signal either weakens or strengthens us. The other day, someone was asking
me about some testing equipment for kinesiology. And I said, ³I don’t need
the testing equipment. I’ve already got it; it’s inside me.² I can look at
something or think of something, and I know the feedback loop. I know
whether it comes back ³this is good² or ³this is bad.² It’s the same
feedback loop that all animals have.

COHEN: So, in other words, you’re saying that when you become more and more
conscious, you become more sensitive to what you should do and what you
shouldn’t do, a direction to go in or a direction not to go in, a place to
eat or a place you shouldn’t eat, that kind of thing? That your intuition
will evolve in leaps and bounds, and you will experience a level of
sensitivity and intuitive knowing that most people would ordinarily be
unaware of, or wouldn’t even be able to imagine?

RAGNAR: Precisely. Now, I know people will say, ³You’re making me feel
guilty now. You’re making me feel uncomfortable because I don’t have that.²
And I say, ³But you can. It’s something that develops in time. It’s all
called consciousness.² Some of us have been at it longer, that’s all. Some
of us have grown up faster. It’s just a part of our evolution. We grow more
conscious if we work at it, and if you make a commitment to work at it, then
you have the ultimate protection. You’re always in the right place at the
right time for the right reason — you are never not. Nothing can happen to
you that you do not designate if you are that conscious.

Now, let’s say my belief is wrong. Okay, we’ll find out. But the neat thing
is that your confidence is bolstered once you realize that the process
works. It works in little ways, and if one is conscious enough to see it
working in little ways, then you will see it working in dramatic ways. I
choose to believe that everything works because you are more conscious. If
you’re conscious, everything works in your favor. And if you’re unconscious,
everything works against you.

COHEN: Is that because if you’re more conscious, you’re at one with the life
process? So then the process itself opens up within you and before you and
around you?

RAGNAR: I’ll give you an example. The other day, a wild coyote came out of
the forest, came right up to me. I was outside, and I opened the door and
said, ³Do you want to come in?² It said, ³Sure.² And it came in. I said,
³Let me fix you a meal.² So my wife and I fixed him a meal. I handed him a
cookie, and he said, ³Thank you, I really appreciate that.² I said, ³Well, I
appreciate your visit. It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Coyote.² And so now Mr.
Coyote comes back and forth. But this is the relationship we have with all
the animals because I see that as an extension of my own energy. This is
life force, just the flow of life force. It’s like I have a kite, and he’s
on the other end, and the wind is blowing, so he runs through the forest.
And then when I wind up the kite, here he comes again.

We have deer, a whole bunch of deer, and when we walk out there, they come
up and nose me. We give them apples. I know the wildlife people in the park
would go crazy if they heard me telling this story. But I say, ³Hey, they
love me, because I love them, and they have nothing stopping them from
feeling that.² We have a wild boar — I mean, you ought to see this thing.
He’s got a mane like a big black lion and burning red eyes — especially at
night — and these big tusks. It would scare the hell out of anybody if they
saw him. We call him by name; I call him Rasputin. He comes running up and
dances around in a circle on the deck. He loves us. And this thing is
totally wild. If a stranger came here, they’d never see this happen. They
wouldn’t see a bear, they wouldn’t see a deer, and they certainly wouldn’t
see the coyotes. The birds leave, too, when the vibrations are wrong or off.

Now, what does that tell you about life? All life is one, and if you’re in
harmony with it, you can walk out into the middle of a forest, walk up to a
strange deer, and touch it. The first time a mama bear came, I was out in
the woods. I laid down in front of her, and she came over and sniffed me.
And I showed her that I was totally surrendered, that I wasn’t going to hurt
her. I have not one ounce of fear or negativity about these animals. You
know, she was pregnant, and she brought her three cubs. She brought them
right to our bedroom door, and we babysat the cubs while she went off and
had some free time. This is on a regular basis. I’ve got photographs of
this. The cubs would come in the bedroom, and we’d watch them until she came
back half an hour later. And then off they’d go with their mama, because
there’s no disconnect. There is no separation. It’s all one beautiful
picture. However, when people with other energies come — people with fears
and apprehensions — they don’t see a thing. The world changes. It’s a
different world. And between the two worlds, I choose this one.

COHEN: Was there a particular moment in your life when you went through a
transition where these things started to happen, when they hadn’t before?

RAGNAR: Yes. I was a spiritual maniac. I would meditate, and I’d sit
cross-legged into the deep hours of the night until my knees and back hurt
like hell. Finally one day, I gave it all up. I said, ³This is nuts; this is
totally nuts. I’m not doing this anymore.² So I just went on doing what I
usually do, and it sort of became a habit to sit before the fire. And one
day, back in 1977 in May — I remember it, full moon night, sitting in front
of the fire — something happened. I was never so frightened in all my life.
Everything I knew about myself seemed to be evaporating and dying,
spontaneously. I felt like I had turned into a pillar of stone, and the last
vestige of what I knew as myself was leaking out. Once the fear evaporated
and the experience ended, I was different.

I don’t know how you explain that, but I can remember going out to my
outhouse the following morning and sitting there with the moonlight coming
in through the trees. I had the door open, and here a fox comes running up
to me, and sits right before me while I’m sitting in the outhouse. Right by
my knees, looking me in the eyes, and talking to me without words. Later
that day, I went out to my garden. I took a little lunch with me so I didn’t
have to go back to the cabin, and when I sat by a big tree to eat, a crow
jumped down, sat on my knee, and said, ³Can I have some of your food?² And I
said, ³Sure.²

From that point on, everything was different. It’s the same world, you know.
I get up, I wash, I use the bathroom, I brush my teeth, I do what everybody
else does, I guess, at least to some degree. But it’s different, because my
amnesia went away. I don’t know if I’m enlightened. I have no idea what the
word means. All I know is that I’m now different, and I like this different
feeling. Nothing has ever been the same.

COHEN: How long had you been a seeker up until that point?

RAGNAR: My entire life. From the time I was a child, in one form or another,
there was something nagging me, an uncomfortable nagging that never went
away.

COHEN: Peter, in the way that you think about it today, is there any
difference between the quest for enlightenment and the quest for physical
immortality? Because most revered sages and masters have passed away.

RAGNAR: I know I go out on a limb when I answer questions like this, but I
have to say, master of what? Master of your thoughts? If you’re a master of
your thoughts, you’re master of your body, master of your money, master of
your life circumstances. If you have personal mastery, then it’s visible,
measurable, and you can demonstrate it.

Right now, at my age, I am master of my body. I’m master of my mind, my
financial world, my emotional world, my personal environment. I don’t know,
maybe it won’t always be that way. But I doubt it. Why would I give up now?
People say, ³You’re getting arrogant, you’re getting pompous, and life is
going to show you.² You know, ³Pride comes before the fall.² And I say,
³Well, pride is something you’ve got to earn.² You earn the right to be
proud of your accomplishment, and at the same time, once you realize how
hard you had to work, you’re immensely humbled.

COHEN: Right. But in relationship to this question, for example, in India,
maybe even in the last century, there were people such as Ramakrishna or
Ramana Maharshi who were undoubtedly highly enlightened beings, yet who died
painful deaths. They died of cancer.

RAGNAR: Well, I guess there was one thing they didn’t have mastery over,
isn’t there?

COHEN: The reason I’m asking is because those individuals were universally
considered to be profoundly enlightened beings. The Buddha, too, seemed to
have passed away from food poisoning. And it seems that the power of their
awakening had everything to do with victory over the mind. Yet they all died
painful deaths.

RAGNAR: I don’t discount their reputations, and I would never say anything
negative about them. But I immediately have doubts about the levels of
mastery. I don’t understand how you can have mastery over your thoughts and
not have mastery over your body, because the body, at least from my
perspective, is your thoughts. Unless you simply choose to commit suicide.
And then I have to wonder, why do you want to do that? Don’t you like the
people around you? I mean, have these disciples absolutely eaten you up? I
don’t know. But at least I’ll go on this particular track until I’m proven
wrong. And when I’m proven wrong, I’ll apologize to them! I’ll say to all
those dead gurus, ³I apologize to you. You were right; you can’t get to keep
this body.²

I’m lonely. I’m out here by myself, Andrew. But I can say for sure that the
little things give you confidence. If you can do the little things, you know
that by the inch it’s a cinch and by the yard it’s hard. So you do the
little things, and you keep building, and every little unit of consciousness
that expands, every little breakthrough that you have, is living a life of
victory. And pretty soon, the final victories, whatever they may be, are
there on the horizon and you’re crashing through them. I’ve often said,
³Okay, so you’ve climbed the mountain. Now we’re standing on the peak. What
do you do next? You step off into space.²

………….

WIE Peter Ragnar Bio & Resources:
http://www.wie.org/bios/peter-ragnar.asp

Roaring Lion Publishing:
http://www.roaringlionpublishing.com/